The Story of mBODYed: We Belong to Ourselves

 

Allow me a moment to tell you a story, my story, of the last 7 years of my career. 

 

I am a teacher.  Some days I teach the clarinet.  Some days I teach the Alexander Technique.  Some days, most days, I teach the person in front of me using all the knowledge and skills I have been fortunate to acquire.  As a teacher, my learning is led by the students who come to me in workshops, classes, and private lessons.  When met with something that I don’t know, I listen, watch, and learn.  I seek out the education and the training to work with the communities that have come to me since I began teaching the Alexander Technique in 2006.

 

In 2016, our lives all took an unexpected turn that changed the way I teach in ways that I could never have anticipated.  On June 12, 2016, I was in DeLand, Florida at Stetson University, expecting to wake up and welcome 80 middle and high school-aged clarinet players to our annual, week-long, Clarinet Clinic.  Instead, the world woke to learn that 49 of our brothers and sisters were brutally murdered at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, FL.

 

I identify as a cisgender, gay, white, southern, male, who was born and raised in Central Florida.  Orlando was my home during my early 20’s.  I came of age in the dance and drag clubs of Orlando.  I spent many nights in Pulse.  This is my home.

 

In the months following, we all struggled to process and adapt to our new lives, where our most sacred of places, our dance clubs, were no longer ours, and no longer safe.  Like many moments in my life, I turned to music for comfort and expression.  I contacted my long-time friend and muse, Carlos Velez, and asked him to write a piece that celebrated our time together in Orlando, and commemorated those who lost their lives while living their truth.  What resulted was Pulse, a 3-movement sonata for clarinet and piano.  In an autobiographical way, this piece was about me and Carlos, friends for 18 years, who would first go to Firestone (movement 1, the dance club), then Southern Nights (movement 2, the drag cabaret), and end up at Pulse to dance into the wee hours of the morning.

 

In the months leading to the premiere of this new piece, I realized and had to process that to play this piece of music, my identity as a gay man from Orlando, had to be front and foremost when I was on stage.  I had to tell my story of who I was and why I was doing this work.  I had to come out professionally and see my sexuality as a driving force in my creative work, no small task.

 

I toured with this piece for a year, playing at international clarinet conferences and universities throughout the US.  Following every performance, there was always a group of young people who wanted to sit with me and tell me their stories, their fears, and their celebrations.  It was then that I learned about representation and the power that we have in paving the way for others who come after us.  Students were telling me that they felt it was now safe for them to express their gender and sexuality on stage because I was doing it, I was making that possible for them.  Again and again, they would thank me for paving the way for them, a non-binary individual, to dress as they are comfortable, not so that others were comfortable watching them. 

 

This was yet another moment of growth.  Could I accept this new role that I was placing myself in?  Did I know what I was doing?  For me, I was just doing what felt authentic to me, which meant that I needed to follow this up with more learning.

 

In the summer of 2019, I was teaching at the summer festival that I have taught at since 2005. (all specific details are withheld to protect the individual).  There, I teach roughly 40 students each summer.  These students range in age from 15-25 and on all orchestral instruments and piano.  I met a young man in his undergraduate years of study, a percussionist.  He was excited for our lesson as he had read “all the books” and was ready for his first hands-on experience.

 

To begin, I asked him to play snare for me.  He set up the drum and began to get ready to play and I saw him transform into a model of “good posture.”  He placed his feet together, moved his head up and back, pulled his shoulders back, and placed his weight in his back, standing firmly behind his hips.  I commented casually as we got to work that this was a very male way to stand and observed him blush.  I asked several times about what that might have been but was assured it was nothing to do with playing the snare so on we went.  Following this lesson, I did much reflecting and considering of what might have been behind this interaction.

 

Two weeks later, he came in with a pair of cymbals.  He was tasked by his teacher to learn to crash the cymbals using his back muscles.  Off we go exploring the connection of the arms into the back and connecting this with playing the cymbals.  He was delighted and commented, “This is why I couldn’t play cymbals last year following my chest surgery.”

 

It was at this moment that I saw the individual in front of me.  He is a transgender male.  And while I had properly identified him as he would have liked me to, I realized at this moment that

I needed to reconsider what I was teaching and how I was teaching it.  Much of my information about the body and how the body moves was from a binary, gendered point of view.

 

In the months following, I began to explore the importance of gender and gender expression in movement and in touch.  I conducted workshops where we explored movement outside of our gender norms, and we explored how gender norms influence the way that we touch one another.  As an Alexander teacher, touch is very important.  Recognizing and giving space for gender is essential in allowing our students to feel safe in our teaching spaces.

 

In Spring 2020, I had an individual in my class who introduced themselves with they/them pronouns and identified as gender fluid.  In an essay in the first few weeks of class, the student reported to me that they were exploring how they organized through their pelvis in relationship to how they felt within their gender and would adapt the tilt of their pelvis to appear and feel more masculine or feminine at any given point in time.  After talking with the students, they were comfortable sharing this information with the class (and with you) and allowed us to take part in their journey through their expression of gender in movement.  They would narrate for us throughout class how things changed for them, and we explored in our bodies what they were exploring in theirs. This was such a beautiful and poignant experience.

 

In the coming months, several events converged.  The quarantine trapped us all inside and alone.  I was in Seattle and had a front-row seat to the BLM riots and CHAZ events happening around me.  I chose to use the extra time to complete an online Certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from Cornell University.  It was then that I felt equipped to look at my work through this lens.

 

 

Health Crisis

In the Fall of 2021, while backstage for my first post-COVID performance, I discovered a suspicious movement in my neck as I was warming up.  After many months of medical testing, I was diagnosed with a unilateral pharyngocele (a protruding pocket off the esophagus resulting from the internal pressure of playing clarinet).  This rare condition is common for those who play clarinet, trumpet, and oboe.  Usually, they are surgically correctable.  Due to four failed surgeries to correct a Zenker’s Diverticulum, my esophageal wall was already compromised.  Surgery was not an option as it could leave me with the inability to talk and swallow.  Knowing that the new condition and the side effects resulting would continue to worsen, I was faced with to decision to make, what am I going to do, and should I make this public? The decision to the first question was fairly clear, I needed to retire from performing, in hopes of preventing surgery for 20+ years.  The second, to be public about the injury was even more difficult.

 

What is a musician without an instrument?  Am I still an artist?  Can I still teach? Will I be enough? Who am I if we cannot make music? These are the questions I asked myself as I confronted this decision and began the process of separating my identity from my profession and my artistry.  Of course, I could continue in my position, but what kind of teacher could I be if I was unable to demonstrate the fundamentals of the clarinet to my undergraduate students?  Could I continue to work in a building, surrounded by music, when I could no longer express myself in the manner that was most comfortable to me?  Ultimately, no, I couldn’t do either. It was time to begin dreaming of what my life would become without my academic position and without music.

 

I also knew that being private about the injury was not an option.  I have based my career on talking about performance-related injuries and best practices for avoiding them.  To retain any creditability in my field, my injury, my process, and any recovery had to be public.

 

Recovery: mBODYed

As I began to consider ideas such as driving for UBER, working for Amazon, and becoming a physical therapist, I realized that I had to do something that was a natural outgrowth of my current work, not a pivot or even a second career. I began to take a deep look at where we are now, post-quarantine, post-COVID, post-BLM, and consider all that we learned and all that we now need.  For the Alexander Technique Community, we learned that the Technique can be taught in a synchronous, online format.  Traditional training programs have previously required large time commitments (1600 hours) and relocation to the area of the program.  This is one barrier preventing Alexander Technique from becoming more well-known and utilized in music education. Bill Conable and I have also identified several factors that have significantly improved the training process and potentially the amount of time that training requires.

 

Combining my music business experience, my knowledge and experience of teaching music, the Alexander Technique, and Body Mapping for 16 years, a deep entrepreneurial spirit, and a ton of love, help, and support from many friends and colleagues, I opened mBODYed, LLC. in October of 2022.  The company is the first of its kind; a hybrid educational and training program for performing artists and teachers.  mBODYed is where I combine somatic teaching with neuroscience and belonging.  It isn’t a pivot, it’s the opportunity to put all of what I do together for the first time. It’s an opportunity to grow and become someone beyond any person that I could have been by teaching clarinet alone.

 

What is mBODYed? 

When thinking about the name and vision of this company, I kept coming back to the ideas of embodiment, embodied learning, diversity and inclusion, and belonging. I kept looking for the intersection of these ideas with Alexander Technique and Body Mapping.  I had to start with the definitions:

Embodiment: the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form.

Embody: to be an expression of or give a tangible or visible form to (an idea, quality, or feeling)

Map: the representation of some “thing” in one medium that exists in another medium

Body Mapping: a way to intentionally clarify, refine, and change one’s body map to align with reality so that movement is freer and less restricted.

Embodied mapping: the visible expression, through poise and movement, of one’s refined body map. The intentional embodiment of one’s refined body map to connect imagination and creative expression.

Embodied Learning: a learning process that orients from a whole body (bodymind/mindbody) perspective, and reinforces the connection, through the body, between what we are learning and who we are as individuals.  Embodied Learning teaches first and foremost that we belong to ourselves, and we are empowered to change the world through our own felt sense of ourselves. – Shawn L. Copeland

m: Mapping

BODY: relates to the bodied nature of the Alexander Technique, Body Mapping, Inclusion, Belonging, and Diversity

ed: Education

 

 

The Vision of mBODYed: Learning to Belong To Ourselves

Through my work following the Pulse album, I realized that our body maps are our stories, they represent who we are as individuals. They are the product of our lived experiences. They are formed within the context of our lives, thus they reflect the cultural and societal ideas around us. Within our maps are our experiences of emotion, race, ethnicity, nationality, education, religion, gender, sexuality, and many other aspects that shape and inform our development. Our lived experiences are reflected in our movement; our movement tells the story of the life that we have lived.

 

When working with our maps, we must honor the history and the story of each person. Thus, I refer to maps that we wish to change simply as outdated, not as errors. They are not errors as we normally might think of them; it isn’t a matter of right and wrong. You are not broken nor need to be fixed. Your body map was able to function and bring you here to this moment; you are doing quite fine. At the time that you learned it, your map was the best choice available and solved the present need, otherwise, you wouldn’t have worked so hard to learn it. Your hardware (your brain and nervous system) is functioning and does not need replacing. Your nervous system and the way you create maps are both working exactly as they should. It is simply that your nervous system is working with information that is no longer serving you well and needs to be updated with more specific information. I like to think of this as a software upgrade.

 

This work begins with acceptance. In many cases, learning cannot begin until we arrive as the sum of all our parts. In doing so, we realize that our potential is greater than the sum of all our experiences. mBODYed Learning is affirming, empowering, and most of all, teaches us that we belong to ourselves.

 

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The Becoming mBODYed Podcast

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The Alexander Technique, a Process of Hope